The Revenge of History:

Very informative book about capitalism's failure, 4 Feb 2013

This Will Podmore review is from: The Revenge of History: The Battle for the Twenty First Century (Hardcover)

This is an excellent book, informative and passionate, which exposes capitalism's responsibility for wars and crises.

Lord Ashdown told us in November 2001 that warnings that invading Afghanistan would lead to a `long-drawn-out guerrilla campaign' were `fanciful'. Jack Straw jeered at those who said that US and British troops might still be fighting there a year later.

Milne looks at the illegal Israeli occupation and siege of Palestine, backed by the USA and the EU. Between 2001 and 2008, 14 Israelis were killed and more than 5,000 Palestinians. Michael Ben-Yair, Israel's attorney-general in the mid-1990s, called the Intifada a `war of national liberation' and wrote, "We enthusiastically chose to become a colonialist society, ignoring international treaties, expropriating lands, transferring settlers from Israel to the occupied territories, engaging in theft and finding justifications for all these activities ... we established an apartheid regime."

Kosovo declared its independence against the wishes of the UN Security Council. Russia, China and Spain all deemed it illegal. NATO forces have occupied Kosovo since 1999. It is `an EU protectorate controlled by Nato troops'. But the Independent on Sunday called NATO's war a `triumph of liberal interventionism'. By 2008 Kosovo had 50 per cent unemployment. It also housed a US military base which was a Guantanamo-style torture camp.

In March 2002 David Frost stated that Mugabe supporters had killed 100,000 people between 2000 and 2002. Actually, 160 people had been killed, by both sides. This was the typical wild inflation of numbers killed by official enemies.

Milne opposed the criminal wars against Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya. Not one terrorist attack or plot against Britain has been sourced to Iraq or Afghanistan, but the `war on terrorism' did not keep our streets safe from terrorism. But, as the CIA reported, the war and embargo against Iraq did kill one million civilians.

In 2003 Milne warned against US attacks on Syria and Iran. In 2005, he warned that rule by radical Islamists was the most likely alternative to Assad.

He points out that we are suffering the failure of capitalism, not of this or that type of capitalism. He argues that capitalism is to blame for war and depression.

Milne writes that the EU is `an undemocratic neoliberal superstate' and remarks on "the economic ideology that has shaped the whole European Union for decades: of deregulation, privatisation and the privileging of corporate power." He also notes, "The government has deliberately used the unregulated EU influx as a sort of twenty-first century incomes policy." He points out that Greece needs an Argentina-style default and devaluation, which means that it needs to exit the euro.

In 2008 New Zealand renationalised its railways and ferry services. Here, British taxpayers give £2 billion a year to the train operating companies. We could renationalise them, at no cost, when their franchises expire.

Private Finance Initiative projects will cost the taxpayer £25 billion more than if the government had paid for them directly. A cross-party House of Commons committee found that PFI was expensive, inefficient, inflexible and unsustainable, but delivered `eye-watering profits', the capitalist class's only real criterion.

By the late 1990s, Russia's national income had fallen by more than 50 per cent, (compared to the USA's 27 per cent in the Great Depression), investment by 80 per cent, real wages by half, and meat and dairy herds by 75 per cent.

In 2010 there was a wave of strikes in China's high-tech export sector, in which workers won 30 per cent wage rises at Foxcomm's production centre in Shenzhen and at Honda's factory in Foshan, and 25 per cent wage rises at the Hyundai supplier in Beijing.

China's share of world manufacturing output has risen from 2 per cent to 20 per cent since 1993. Investment soared, so growth soared too, yet China's deficit is only 2 per cent.

Between 2007 and 2011 US national income rose by just 0.6 per cent, the EU's fell by 0.3 per cent and Japan's by 5.2 per cent; China's grew by more than 42 per cent. No wonder we so often hear wishful forecasts of a Chinese crash.

With capitalism's failure so clear, the ruling class's lies against socialism grew ever cruder. Stalin was `as much an aggressor as Hitler', said Niall Ferguson (Guardian, 1 September 2009). Orlando Figes opined that the Non-aggression pact was `the licence for the Holocaust' (BBC website, `Viewpoint: The Nazi-Soviet Pact', 21 August 2009).

Louise Minchin on BBC Breakfast Time sneered that President Chavez was `famous for his promises of social change' (5 January 2013). In the real world, Chavez's policies nearly halved poverty in Venezuela, provided free health care and education, virtually ended illiteracy, set up thousands of cooperatives, got cheap food to poorer people, brought privatised utilities and oil production back under public ownership and control, raised pensions and the minimum wage, and redistributed land.
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www.camdennewjournal.com/illtyd-harrington-take-establishment-go-too-far-and-you%E2%80%99ll-get-hurt

ILLTYD HARRINGTON: Take on the establishment but go too far and you’ll get hurt
Submitted by Allan Ledward on Thu, 2013-08-15 14:16
Published: 15 August, 2013
by ILLTYD HARRINGTON

THESE are the dog days in London.

The place has emptied out.

The politicians, weary of filling in expense forms and free receptions, have gone back to their constituencies.

The catwalk girls have fled to the sun and major sporting events can no longer feed adrenalin to armchair athletes. London, to all intents and purposes, is in rapid intellectual decline, accentuated by the exodus.

We are a tourists’ bazaar, a place of ancient empty buildings and churches, and rows of sullen faces. Suburbanites watch in genuine sorrow when children in the new TV series

The Mill are still working to achieve the 10-hour day. These same people seem not to be conscious that they have had their own hours increased, retirement delayed and wages frozen.

The personal debt of every individual in Britain is huge. The credit card makes it all seem so buoyant and pleasant – better to be in the lifeboat than struggling in the sea.

And then Seamus Milne comes along, an assistant editor of The Guardian with a collection of his articles over the last 10 years.

Its title is an antidote to complacency. Milne’s consistent stand has earned him vicious contempt, even from contemporaries on his own paper. The friends of the establishment do not like to be disturbed, and have an indecent relationship with Number 10 and the Treasury.

But Milne digs in like a ferret and his accuracy of information is enviable.

His views are a breath of fresh air.

First he sees, like so many other observers, the decline of the United States’ power.

He probes. What were the hidden facts, figures and decisions which led to the intervention in the Middle East and Afghanistan?

Tony Blair and his lapdog Jack Straw bowed before the American throne. Then it was Jack and Condee – but such familiarity buttered no parsnips as the death toll mounted.

This war on terror was a deception.

You might as well remember Al Capone as a tax inspector in Chicago rather than a tax evader.

Two years ago a United Nations exploratory team listed the treasure house of mineral wealth that Afghanistan has.

A former colonel in the Black Watch is chief adviser to a company which waits hungrily to reap the harvest.

Kabul is now the opium capital of the world. Ten years ago Helmand was an unknown province.

The second prong of Milne’s argument is about the financial crisis which hit the capitalist world in 2008.

Would you believe that the collapse of financial institutions was saved by a blood transfusion from public funds?

Here again the aggressors and failures masqueraded themselves as the saviours of the system.

It has been calculated that in real terms it has taken £49billion to be pumped from the public into the private banking system.

In his passion for accuracy he defends North Korea – to me a shaky argument.

However he spells out very clearly one consequence of western belligerence being the rise of China as an alternative to the American presence.

China’s model of communism is very much a classic old Chinese puzzle, but it has over a billion people at various stages of social development.

Milne asks why the US, a country of some 310 million, has a military presence in 120 of the world’s 195 countries. But that hold is showing signs of weakening – it is unaffordable.

Milne is no armchair journalist.

He goes out, asks questions and observes. He sees in Cuba, Mexico, Brazil and Venezuela, power passing steadily to the people.

The usual characterisation of Cuba he dismisses, once you take account of the extraordinary achievements of the Cuban health service.

During his time in south America, Pope Francis spent some time in the slums and probably rubbed shoulders with a thousand Cuban doctors who are living and working with people in these hellish conditions.

If you need proof that you are living in a country where things are done in secret, get a tube to the Public Records Office in Kew and read about some of the things that Margaret Thatcher was up to before and during the miners’ strike of 1984-5. What a nasty vindictive woman she was. Now we know that even Norman Tebbit tried to hold her back.

You can criticise the establishment but don’t go too far or you will get hurt. Alasdair Milne, Seamus’s father, was the former head of the BBC, given the heave-ho for allowing a film to be shown criticising the behaviour of some of the army in Northern Ireland.

If you doubt my enthusiasm, read Seamus’s predictions for a Tory government 15 days before the May 2010 election: “If the Conservatives come to power it will mean the deepest cuts since the 1930s, lower taxes for the wealthy and mass privatisation of public services... and people power will provide the cover for the break up of the welfare state.”

This is a book to stir the grey cells. Throw away complacency and yell: Not in my name.

• The Revenge of History: The Battle for the 21st Century, by Seamus Milne, is published by Verso at £9.99.